Laura Brehaut tells us why we knead good flour for our bakes

In Flour Lab, Adam Leonti illustrates why fresh flour can’t be beat

Baking and cooking with freshly milled flour changes everything. Full of flavour and character, a reflection of craft and terroir, it stands in stark contrast to the status quo. We may be used to conventional flour — a shelf- stable product of nebulous origins and attributes — but the virtues of the alternative are obvious upon first bite. When stonemilled from whole grains and used fresh, flour shifts from being a glossed-over staple to singular ingredient.

In the face of retail flour shortages, people have been turning to small commercial stone mills as never before. Countertop grain mills and attachments for stand mixers, such as Mockmill and Komo, are sold out at retailers across the country. Buying freshly milled flour, or the means to make it yourself, is a practical move given the present circumstances. But it’s a choice that brings intangible benefits at all times, not just during trying ones.

Food made with freshly milled flour has “tremendously more exciting flavour,” says Adam Leonti, and is a major source of inspiration for him as a chef. “I want everyone to start using it,” he writes in Flour Lab (with Katie Parla).

In his debut cookbook, Leonti provides a resource for making and cooking with fresh flour. As true for flour as it is for coffee, he says, freshness is inextricable from flavour. Industrial flour is as far apart from fresh as pre-ground coffee is from its newly milled counterpart. They share the same source, but offer completely disparate experiences.

“If you grind coffee beans to order, like more or less every espresso shop in the world, it’s such a massive difference. It’s not a small difference,” says Leonti. At his New York restaurant, Sofia’s, he makes bread, pasta and pizza using hand- milled organic flour. At the beginning of the pandemic, unable to source whole grains, he fell back on flour from a local mill. Having been a fresh- flour proponent since he bought his first mill in the early 2010s as chef de cuisine at Vetri in Philadelphia, this served as a reminder. “It’s not even half as flavourful,” he says. “It still goes through the same process of oxidizing.”

Industrial flour is made using roller mills, which grind wheat berries at high speed and volume. The process produces a “practically inert” flour stripped of parts of the grain: the bran ( fibrous outer layer, which is reintroduced to make conventional whole wheat flour) and germ ( holder of fat, flavour and nutrients). What’s left, in the case of white flour, is crushed endosperm ( the third main component of a grain’s anatomy).

In contrast, stone- milled flour contains all three principal parts of the wheat berry. Here lies the perishability — when the oils in the germ are exposed to air during milling, they begin to oxidize. With whole-grain flour, as with coffee, fresh is best. In order to preserve both its flavour and nutrition, Leonti recommends you only mill or buy as much flour as you need, and store any excess in a sealed container in the fridge or freezer.

Leonti emphasizes that although provenance is important, grains — dry and shelfstable in their whole state — ship well. And while wheat is grown in many places, some regions are known as breadbaskets for good reason. “The world knows Manitoba as the place for wheat,” he says. “Everyone I worked with in Italy used Manitoba flour. So if they just switched from using Manitoba flour to using Manitoba grain and then milling it themselves, now they’re going to have the best of both worlds.”

With chapters devoted to bread, pasta, pizza as well as pastry, cookies and cakes, Leonti developed all the recipes in Flour Lab with and for freshly milled, whole- grain flours. Ideally, he writes, you would mill the flour immediately before making the recipe, using organic ( or biodynamic) wheat berries. Whether you’re buying grains to mill at home or freshly milled flour, he includes advice for getting the best product from millers, farmers’ markets, speciality shops or supermarkets.

Depending on where they were grown and their type, grains can have vastly different characteristics. To help guide grain choices, Leonti provides an overview of the wheat varieties ( e. g., winter versus spring, hard versus soft) and species ( e. g., ancient grains such as einkorn and spelt) he uses in the book. He chose the grains for their availability, and the recipes he developed had to fit one key criterion. They had to be “craveable.”

“I didn’t want the quality of the food items that you’re already familiar with to suffer. The grain choices always came from, ‘How do we get to where we need to go?’ There’s nothing worse to me as a chef than when someone says, ‘ That’s a really good whole wheat pasta.’ Because it’s not the actual compliment you were hoping for,” says Leonti, laughing. “You want it to stop at, ‘Oh, wow! That’s amazing!’ The recipes were chosen to give people that ability.”